Maynard, MA, USA: Beacon-Villager newspaper column on local history, observations on nature and recreational activities, plus an occasional health-related article. Columns from 2009-11 collected into book "MAYNARD: History and Life Outdoors." Columns from 2012-14 collected into book "Hidden History of Maynard." - David A. Mark

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Wednesday, September 20, 2017

To cut to the chase, there are Instagram postings for
#maynardlifeoutdoors (created by yours truly), #maynardma, #assabetriver, #stow ma #assabetriverrailtrail, and #lakeboon (and #lakeboone). For those not
deeply into social media – a.k.a. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and so on,
Instagram in its most basic form allows people to share pictures and videos to
computers and mobile phones. The business with hashtags (#) means that if a
person searches Instagram on that term, they can see all postings that people
have posted with that term. This can be futile. A photo of a dog, with the
hashtag #dog, becomes part of a list of 155 million dog photos. Hashtag #parrot
yields more than two million photos. But hashtag #deadparrot yields only a
thousand or so photos, some relating to the dead parrot sketch from the Monty
Python television show.

Garter snake, posted to #maynardlifeoutdoors

Hashtag #maynardlifeoutdoors (again, me) currently has about 25 images
and 10 followers. Hint: you can follow. Photos hashtagged there are also
hashtagged to #assabetriver or #assabetriverrailtrail if appropriate.

Followers: If you, as an Instagram user, decide to ‘Follow’
someone, that means anytime you go to Instagram you can check on the people you
are following to see their most recent postings, then optionally ‘Like’ those
postings, and/or leave a comment. (The creator of the account has the power to
delete comments.) Current estimates are that Instagram has about 700 million
registered users, with perhaps half that number visiting the site frequently.
More than 50 billion images have been uploaded.

Instagram especially appeals to people in the images
business, examples including painting, drawing, costumes, tattoos, photography…
It becomes an aspect of marketing their businesses, much as company websites
complement brochures. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 (making the founders
very rich), so people are able to post content to both sites simultaneously.

Here are two sides of a small stone, painted, and left in a public place as part of the Maynard Rocks public display. Hundreds of children - and artists - have placed these about town for others to find, photograph, move to new locations, perhaps even to keep (discouraged). Maynard Rocks has a Facebook page, and also, as of mid-September, an Instagram address: #maynardrocks

Locally, there are hundreds of images posted to #maynardma,
#assabetriver and #lakeboon. One of the problems is that people tend to be liberal
with their attachment of hashtags to their photos, so a search on #maynardma
will yield not only images of things in Maynard, but scores upon scores of
photos of people you do not know, who either live in Maynard, or just happened
to be visiting Maynard when a photo was taken, or post photos of women’s hair
(styled in Maynard?), or are of a performer name Conrad Maynard.

For reasons unclear to my neophyte understanding of
Instagram, a search on #stow ma with a space between "stow" and "ma" is needed to get to the collection of 1,257 postings
at #stowma. The order of appearance appears to be a handful of the most popular
postings, followed by recent postings. For Stow, whoever has been posting is a big fan
of photographs of flowers, and of tomatoes (!?).

Instagram has a downside. For teens especially, social
media platforms are a measure of popularity. There is pressure to post really
good photos of oneself, to the point that some people resort to professional
make-up and hair preparation. A dearth of followers, and/or negative comments, can
be disheartening. A survey conducted in England in 2017 reported that
Instagram rated highest among social media platforms for teen problems with
bullying, body image, anxiety, depression and loneliness.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

If any remnants of Hurricane Irma reach eastern Massachusetts, all we
are likely to see are rainy days. But there are historical records of much,
much stronger storms having a direct, catastrophic impact locally.

1635: The Great Colonial Hurricane made landfall at Narragansett Bay in late August as a fast-moving Category
3 hurricane. It crossed directly over the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Historians
consider this "… probably the most intense hurricane in New
England history.”

1938: The practice of naming Atlantic hurricanes with
women’s names did not begin until 1947; or retiring names of major storms after
1955, or having men’s names rather than only women’s starting in 1979. Thus,
the storm of 1938 came be known as the Great New England Hurricane, also the
Long Island Express. Mistakes in interpreting weather data had led to a
prediction that this storm would dissipate to gale force before making
landfall. Instead, on September 21, 1938, it reached Long
Island with hurricane force winds and a significant storm surge.
More than 600 people died – mostly in Rhode
Island. The oldest residents of Maynard and Stow remember vast numbers
of trees being blown down, blocking streets and damaging buildings.

1954: A double-header! Hurricane Carol also crossed the east
end of Long Island, reaching landfall as a
Category 2 storm. In Boston, high winds
destroyed the steeple of the OldNorthChurch.
Hurricane Edna crossed Cape Cod as a Category
2 storm just ten days after Carol had tracked a bit farther west. Locally, rainfall
of 5 to 10 inches on ground already saturated by the passage of Carol flooded
basements and rivers. Combined, the storms destroyed much of the peach and
apple crops just weeks before harvest time.

1955: Hurricane Diane waltzed ashore in the Carolinas,
wandered across New Jersey and southern New York, before heading eastward across much of Massachusetts. By this
time it was weak wind-wise, but very, very wet. Much of southern Massachusetts, from its border with New York to the ocean, experienced flooding.
Half of Worcester
was under water. Locally, an estimated 15 inches of rain fell in four days. The
AssabetRiver crested at 8.93 feet, the highest
it had been since 1927 and the highest since. (The flood of 2010 crested at 7.1
feet.) Main Street
flooded, as did the first floor of the mill building closest to the river. No
bridges were lost.

1991: Hurricane Bob!!! This storm of August skirted the
coast before making landfall at Newport,
Rhode Island as a Category 2
hurricane. Forecasting was good, so Rhode Island
and Connecticut
were able to declare of emergency before the storm hit. The storm crossed
eastern Massachusetts
fast and relatively dry, so most of the damage was due to high winds and storm
surge along the coast. Provincetown
reported sustained winds exceeding 100 miles per hour. Locally, downed trees
and minor damage to buildings. The name “Bob” was permanently retired, joining
Diane, Edna and Carol as other New England
hurricane names we will never hear anew.

An explanation of ‘storm surge’: coastal flooding can be
severe during hurricanes (and also northeasters). Storms are centers of low air
pressure, meaning less weight of air on the water, causing water level to rise underneath storms, which have low barometric pressure.
Of much greater importance, the push of wind across long distances of water for
prolonged periods of time not only generates large waves, but pushes water.
When this reaches shore at times of high tide, the water can be five, ten,
fifteen, even twenty feet above normal high tide. The Galveston,
Texas hurricane of 1900 pushed a storm surge
of 10 to 15 feet across a city that was mostly 10 feet above sea level,
flattening the city and resulting in a loss of an estimated 10,000 lives,
making it the deadliest natural disaster to every strike the United States. The Texas flooding from Hurricane Harvey was from rain, whereas the coastal flooding from Hurricane Irma was mostly storm surge (as when Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey and New York).

One oddity - a storm tracking north along a west coast, much as Irma tracked north along the west side of Florida, will initially push water away from the shore, as wind direction on the north side of the storm is east to west. After the eye passes, the winds on the south side of the storm blow west to east, pushing all the water back.

All Irma delivered to eastern Massachusetts was scattered showers. Jose blessed Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and the outer Cape with gale force winds and inches of rain, but much less west of Boston. Maria is too far away to guess what it will bring to New England.

Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Consider the muskrat. A muskrat can be thought of as a
low-rent version of a beaver – they toil but do not build, their tails make no
signature slap upon the waters when startled, trapped, their fur is worth less,
and no college (and only one high school – Algonac, MI) ever selected the
muskrat as its mascot; this versus the beaver mascots for MIT, Caltech, Babson College,
Oregon State University, University of Maine at Farmington, and others. For more than 125
years there was a BeaverCollege, originally located in the town of Beaver, PA, but later relocated across the state to near Philadelphia; from 1907 to 1972 it was BeaverCollege
for Women, then co-ed, meaning that it was also BeaverCollege for men, but finally
undertaking a name change in 2001 to ArcadiaUniversity. (Past
graduates were able to get replacement diplomas with the new name.)

Enough with run-on sentences. The muskrat is small. Adults
weight about three pounds (compared to 30 or more for a beaver). The muskrat is
short-lived. Average lifespan in the wild is 3-4 years. The muskrat is
prolific. Females reach sexual maturity at one year, and can have 2-3 litters
per year, 6-8 kits per litter. The muskrat is omnivorous. While the roots and
stems of aquatic plants are a diet mainstay, muskrats will eat insects,
crayfish and dead fish. In turn, the muskrat is food for many predators,
falling prey to mink, coyote, fox and raccoons on land, owls descending from
the air, lastly snapping turtles, otters and large fish in the water.

Muskrat swimming. When startled, they can
dive, and stay under water several minutes.

Muskrats are covered with short, thick fur brown or black in
color, with the belly a bit lighter. The fur has two layers, which helps
protect them from the cold water. The tail is hairless, rat-like in appearance,
and used for swimming. The tail drags on the ground when walking on land, and
so leaves a distinctive trail when walking on mud or snow.

Muskrats spend much of their time in the water, typically
the shallow water of marshlands, streams and small ponds. Muskrats will reside
at beaver ponds, and may even move into an abandoned beaver lodge. Otherwise,
muskrats create modest-sized mounds of soft vegetation (not sticks or branches)
near the shore, with a living chamber inside and an underwater entrance, or
else burrow into river banks and live in these tunnels. The combination of less
vegetation (eaten or for habitat) and shoreline burrowing contributes to erosion and
flood risk.

A muskrat "push-up", in this instance using stems from marsh plants,
provides some shelter from weather and predators, but is not nearly
as large or as sturdy as a beaver family's branches and mud abode.

Muskrats are indigenous to North
America. Because many people in many countries thought it would be
a good idea, muskrats are an invasive species across much of northern Europe,
across much of Siberia, and also in parts of South America.
The animals were imported either for fur farms, and then escaped, or were released
to the wild with the idea that local trappers would have one more species to
trap. The consequences are the same ecological impacts seen in North America – erosion and flood risk – made worse by the
absence of mink, the primary predator. (Mink is also an invasive species in
parts of Europe, but that is another story.)

In Massachusetts,
shooting muskrats is against the law, but a license can be obtained for
trapping. The season opens on November 1st and closes at the end of
February. Muskrat fur does not have the same cachet as mink, but there is some
demand for muskrat pelts, especially from Korea
and China.
Prices at auction are about $3-4/pelt. Wild mink brings about $10-12/pelt.
Farmed mink, a larger animal with a higher quality fur, brings $50-80/pelt. The
official winter hat of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is made with muskrat
fur.